Tendeléo's
Story by Ian
McDonald(PS
Publishing, £25 / £8, 91 pages, hardcover / trade paperback; published
2000. Reprinted in 2001 in Futures, edited by Peter Crowther,
and in 2002 in Binary 3, both published by Gollancz.)

Yet another excellent original novella from PS Publishing, Tendeleo's
Story is an intriguing sidebar by Ian McDonald to his Chaga
series (reviewed
elsewhere in infinity
plus). Not a sequel but rather a commentary on events already
narrated, it witnesses those events from a compelling and necessary
new angle, lending McDonald's core texts a liberating additional dimension.
Chaga and its successors are elaborate parables of human evolution,
and Tendeleo's Story is a measure of McDonald's own creative
evolution, now at a very exciting juncture indeed.

As I've remarked elsewhere: reading Chaga (1995) and Kirinya
(1998), there is an exhilarating sense of just how far SF itself has
evolved. The devices of the genre are comprehensively present: alien
invasion; Big Dumb Objects; nanotechnology; heroic Westerners exploring
darkest Space (and Darkest Africa); an immense resurgence in the space
shuttle programme, involving multiple launches of craft named after
American SF authors. But all of these work in contradiction of their
customary ideological function, failing or baffling the capitalist West,
even as they emancipate the peoples of the tropics from their thralldom
to the bloc of "developed nations". Third World communities adapt with
difficulty to the transforming alien infestation known as the Chaga,
but in time thrive in its embrace, achieving technological, social,
and personal metamorphoses beyond their formerly humble dreams. The
conventions of a thoroughly Western literature offer sudden hope to
the poor and exploited of the Earth, a rare event in the history of
SF.

But for all the revisionist fervour of their telling, Chaga
and Kirinya remain constrained: like so many previous European
tales of Africa, they have White protagonists, White narrators, White
interpreters of events, ignoring the salient need for a strong indigenous
viewpoint. Tourists and missionaries and outside advisors and foreigners
gone native are all very well, but what about the people most directly
and intimately affected by the Chaga? Tendeleo's Story boldly
compensates for this lack. It is what its title indicates: the autobiographical
narrative of a young Kenyan woman, whose village is one of countless
many "threatened" by the advance of the luminous landscape of the Chaga.
Her happy childhood is contrasted with the chaos during and after evacuation;
the sinister anarchy of Nairobi amounts to a comprehensive indictment
of the sick old ways of the corrupt post-independence African nation
states; Tendeleo's escape to the West is all along an involuntary evasion
of the magical promise of the Chaga. Utopia beckons within the quarantined
zone, and in the end Tendeleo's Story provides the series' clearest
sense yet of what living in and with the Chaga would mean, the clearest
sense yet of how the actual Africa must transform if it is to survive
at all.

With creditable authenticity, McDonald reproduces the sort of child's
odyssey through enchanted Africa that indigenous writers like Ben Okri
have so memorably set down before him. Just as much to his credit, he
proceeds further, inverting the narrative hierarchy that Chaga
and Kirinya upheld despite themselves. Where African voices in
those novels were occasional, subordinate, perhaps even tokenistic,
the part of supporting narrator in Tendeleo's Story falls to
a Westerner, a (black) Englishman who loves and assists Tendeleo, and
who ultimately exchanges his world for hers. Their relationship is the
medium McDonald employs finally to bring African interests to the foreground
in his series, and the effect is refreshing, indeed--why not?--liberating.
In a real sense, Tendeleo's Story is thus a tale of conceptual
breakthrough; but the breakthrough is quite unlike SF's myriad conventional
ones, being a breakthrough by the author and his readers into a cognitive
space Tendeleo the narrator has inhabited long since.

Tendeleo's Story is one well worth reading, well worth heeding.
It gazes boldly into the heart of darkness, and finds there a great
and galvanising hope. No mean achievement.